Honore de Balzac Quotes
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The Police and the Society of Jesus posses in common the virtue of never forsaking their enemies as friends.
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A murderer is less loathsome to us than a spy. The murderer may have acted on a sudden mad impulse; he may be penitent and amend; but a spy is always a spy, night and day, in bed, at table, as he walks abroad; his vileness pervades every moment of his life.
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Who shall ever tell how much an unmerited disfavor crushes a shy person? Who can ever depict the misfortunes of timidity?
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If the human heart sometimes finds moments of pause as it ascends the slopes of affection, it rarely halts on the way down.
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We are scarcely apt to berate the source of enjoyment.
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A woman in love has full intelligence of her power; the more virtuous she is, the more effective her coquetry.
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No society is complete without some victim, a creature to pity, to jeer at, to scorn or to protect.
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What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
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The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.
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Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
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White and shining virgin of all human virtues, ark of the covenant between earth and heaven, tender and strong companion partaking of the lion and of the lamb, Prayer! Prayer will give you the key of heaven! Bold and pure as innocence, strong, like all that is single and simple, this glorious, invincible Queen rests, nevertheless, on the material world; she takes possession of it; like the sun, she clasps it in a circle of light.
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Prostitution and robbery are two living protests, respectively female and male, made by the natural state against the social state.
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A beautiful book is a victory won in all the battlefields of human thought.
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Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.
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If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one ... he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.
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At fifteen, neither beauty nor talent exist: a woman is all promise.
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Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them, the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which befits it.
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The secret of the nobility and beauty of great ladies lies in the art with which they can shed their veils. In such situations, they become like ancient statues. If they kept the merest scarf on, they would be lewd. Your bourgeois woman will always try to cover her nakedness.
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Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
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Passions are no more forgiving than human laws and they reason more justly. Are they not based on a conscience of their own, infallible as an instinct?
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Woman is closer to angels than man because she knows how to mingle an infinite tenderness with the most absolute compassion.
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When passion is not fed, it changes to need. At this juncture, marriage becomes a fixed idea in the mind of the bourgeois, being the only means whereby he can win a woman and appropriate her to his uses.
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Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice.
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In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.